"Nosebleed"

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How nice was it to have Fiona nearly ingesting several granules' worth of drugs atop her chocolate doughnut at the beginning of last week's episode, and then yelling, "Look how high I am, Mom!" at the beginning of this week's episode? I'll answer: it was, in a word, nice. Then one of whiny Fiona's two balloons goes pop, she refuses to accept a replacement, and Grace surrenders one of her two balloons to the bright blue sky above just to make her sister feel better. There's a lesson there about holding on to two things at once—either one gets destroyed or you have to let it go—but Jackie is too busy basking in how well Grace is temporarily doing to notice.

Later, when Eddie is pillow-talking to Jackie about parallel universes, Jackie only gets interested when he tells her that it might be possible to be in two places at once. Jackie, of course, already lives in parallel universes: the one where she's a married, semi-responsible parent with HusbandBot3000 in Queens and Max Brenner: Chocolate By The Bald Man; and the one where she's a single mom super-nurse with Eddie at All Saints—but she hasn't mastered the two-places-at-once trick yet. And though it may look easy to people like Dr. Fancypants and her Parisian sister, hopping from one parallel universe to another isn't fun, "It's fucking hard." For one thing, all the painkillers you snort to keep the guilt and, well, pain away eventually give you nosebleeds.

Jackie is cracking. (Zing!) And with only three more episodes to go this season, this episode of Nurse Jackie felt like one grand set-up for Jackie's inevitable fall. First, there are the nosebleeds which Dr. Fancypants, if she is such a great doctor, should be able to accurately diagnose eventually—especially if Jackie gets into a fight with her about gossiping to her sister, and pushes her away. Then there's Jackie's slip-up on treating the "undomiciled" man's gangrened foot back when it was a blister—a mistake she tries to blame on Zoey, who takes impeccable records about her mentor's every word in an adorable pink notebook. If Zoey doesn't realize that Jackie was lying and shifting blame then, she'll definitely realize it when she discovers a page from her notebook is missing.

And finally there's Jackie's sloppy handling of the stoner's alleged organ donation. In the pilot, we saw Jackie lie about an organ donation in a much smoother, more convincing way—with a forged organ donation signature on the back of a driver's license and everything. Now, however, Jackie has nosebleeds, and people with nosebleeds don't think straight. She doesn't have a license to forge a signature on, only a PETA card. The stoner's parents don't want him to be a donor. Jackie lies to the organ retrieval team about Coop signing off on the donation. And when Jackie's newest, fiercest enemy, Coop, puts his pants back on, he's probably gonna have something to say about the whole thing. With all that, and Eddie pushing to meet Jackie's daughter, it appears that Jackie's single-mom, super-nurse balloon is about ready to pop.

Grade: B+

Stray Observations:

--Oh, and, yeah, Akalitus told a couple their baby was dead, watched them cry a bit, and then gave it back to them.

--Also, Akalitus thinks all gay people know about adoption? At least she has more of a personality than HusbandBot3000.

--Next week: Jackie & Grace start tap dance lessons together—Hopefully in the form of at least one dance montage.